In an ominous sign of what will soon be coming to America the Ukranian government has begun targeting protesters through the tracking of cellphone metadata. The ongoing unrest that was sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject overtures by the European Union to enter into a trade pact in favor of a rapprochement with mother Russia continues to rage in the streets of Kiev with no end in sight. The pictures and video that are put out show a surreal and twisted winter wonderland scene of fire, paramilitary riot police forces in the traditional Darth Vader regalia in a pitched battle with citizens seeking to prevent being absorbed by the cruel and oppressive land from which they won independence from when the USSR imploded.
The protests have been ongoing although going through the phases of both heavy and more restrained moves and counter-moves by opponents on both sides of what could rapidly deteriorate into a bloody civil war much like the one that is ongoing in Syria. The ruling faction as they always are prone to do are desperate to hold onto power lest they find their heads mounted on pikes but in the modern world of global telecommunications it would not be good public relations were the state to just send in the tanks and begin firing into the crowds at random with live ammo. In what is certainly a sign of the times the harnessing of technology is now being introduced in an attempt to quell the unrest reverberating among the peasants.
According to a New York Times report the besieged government is now taking a page from the NSA Stasi’s playbook and using cellphone metadata to identify people who happen to be near what the state deems to be a violent protest. Shortly after a new laws restricting rights to speech and public assembly went into affect the cellphones of people in the vicinity of a location where protesters were fighting with police were sent a mass text message stating that “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance”. This introduction of what are certainly yet to be revealed NSA tactics show just how easily that a government can use the ability of technology to create their watch lists and scramble the goon squads to arrest, imprison and even potentially disappear dissenters. There has also been an introduction of violence into the protests that in turn smacks of both the tactics of Nazi brownshirts and government backed agent provocateurs.
The use of violence to both splinter the opposition to a tyrannical regime as well as to use such actions to tar all protesters (even relatively peaceful ones) as anarchists thereby justifying the full fury of the state to put down the uprising in the interests of the safety of the general population is an ancient one. It is the introduction of the modern technological use of cellphone tracking that is the most ominous though. I excerpt the following from a story that was published in the Washington Post by Andrea Peterson that is entitled "Ukraine’s 1984 moment: Government using cellphones to track protesters":
As eerie as the text message may seem, it was likely not technically difficult to achieve. Presumably, authorities could determine who was in the vicinity of the protest by going through the records of nearby cell towers. In the United States, that type of information can be requested from mobile providers in the form of "tower dumps" which reveal the locations of hundreds or thousands of innocent citizens associated with a specific cell tower, along with suspects. A recent congressional inquiry shows that U.S. law enforcement made more than 9,000 requests for tower dumps in 2012.
Cell site location data is considered metadata. The U.S. government denies that it is currently tracking mobile phone locations domestically, although it admits to running a test project on the subject in recent years. And documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden show the NSA tracks 5 billion mobile device locations daily around the world.
While the situation in Ukraine is not likely to soon be repeated in The Homeland - at least barring a black swan event that could trigger the imminent collapse - those who understand why these police state programs have truly been launched would do well to cast a wary eye upon Kiev. The future of America is on display there and despite the ongoing failure of the corrupt corporate state domestic media to cover such things the world has been besieged by uprisings, protests, revolutions and insurrections in recent years. The continuing redistribution of wealth into the coffers of the most corrupt that comprise a global elite is causing misery begat by skyrocketing food prices, massive unemployment, blatantly corrupt governments and their oppressive police state policies all of which are fueling a backlash the swine who run the big con are terrified by.
For some interesting Friday night bedtime reading I would recommend the following, make of them what you will but if pay attention you will very clearly see that the coming crackdown once the Ukraine situation spreads has already been taken into consideration by the elites: "Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future" a 2007 article from The Guardian and the referenced and updated version of the report itself .
And this is just what the Brits are predicting, the contingency plans for putting down dissent in The Homeland is going be far worse simply due to the increasingly dreadful but unavoidable fact that we have the worst type of lunatics running the asylum with the full power of the state behind them.
(Image: The Guardian)
